On July 7, 2016, five police officers were shot and killed in Dallas during what had been a peaceful protest. Three days later, WTTW’s Carol Marin sat down with two retired Chicago officers — Richard Wooten and Brian Warner — for a thirteen-minute segment asking the question a lot of newsrooms were asking that week: what does something like this do to the men and women still wearing the uniform?
It’s a fair question for a news segment. It’s a much bigger question than thirteen minutes can actually hold.
The job that needs you back tomorrow
Here’s what almost never makes it into that kind of coverage: for the people actually doing the job, Dallas wasn’t a headline. It was a gut-check that arrived on a Thursday, and by Friday morning, officers everywhere were back on shift — because the job doesn’t pause for grief. Calls still come in. Streets still need patrolling. Nobody radios in to say they need a week before they can go back out there.
That’s true for police work. It’s just as true for the military, for emergency medicine, for fire and rescue, for any job built around being the person other people call when something’s going wrong. The uniform — literal or otherwise — comes with an unspoken expectation: whatever you’re carrying, carry it quietly, and be ready for the next call anyway.
Richard spent twenty-three years inside that expectation. When Carol Marin asked him to talk about what an event like Dallas does to officers, he wasn’t speaking hypothetically. He was describing something he’d lived through more than once, in a job that never built in time to grieve it properly.
Grief that doesn’t get permission to land
There’s a specific kind of grief that first responders, veterans, and anyone in high-stakes service work knows and almost nobody else does: grief you don’t get to have on schedule. You don’t get the week off. You don’t get the quiet house and the casseroles and the permission everyone else seems to receive when something devastating happens. You get the next shift, the next deployment, the next call, and an unspoken rule that says the job comes first and the feeling comes later — if it ever gets scheduled in at all.
The mistake is thinking “later” means “never.” It doesn’t. Grief that doesn’t get processed doesn’t cancel itself out just because you kept showing up. It waits. And it compounds — one unprocessed loss stacking on the next, until a man who has survived a decade of genuinely hard things finds himself struggling with something that, on paper, looks smaller than what he’s already been through.
That’s not weakness. That’s math. Grief that never gets set down adds up, whether or not you ever gave it the room to.
If this is you
If you’re in a job that keeps needing you back before you’ve finished processing what just happened — a badge, a uniform, a call schedule, a title that makes people assume you’re fine — you already know some version of what this feels like. Maybe it’s recent. Maybe it’s something from years ago that you never actually set down, because the next shift started before you got the chance.
You don’t need a name for what you’re carrying to talk about it. You don’t need it to be as visible or dramatic as five officers killed on a July morning. You just need somewhere to say it out loud, to someone who has actually carried a version of it himself and knows the specific way this kind of grief hides inside people who are good at their jobs.
What Richard offers
Richard isn’t a clinician and he’s not offering anything that replaces care he’s not positioned to give — if what you’re carrying needs more specialized support, he’ll tell you plainly and help connect you to it. What he offers is something a lot of first responders and veterans have never had: a conversation with someone from inside the work, who understands both the job and what the job costs, and who isn’t going to treat what you’re carrying as smaller than it is just because you’re still showing up to your shifts.
If what you’re carrying feels urgent or unsafe right now — for you or someone you love — please don’t wait to address it. Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), call 911, or go to your nearest emergency room. See our Crisis & Safety Notice for more. Everything else here can wait until you’re safe.
Richard Wooten is a United States Army veteran, a retired Chicago Police Officer, and minister and founder of The Gathering Point.
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